`Cats` Lifts Pizazz To Purrfection

March 25, 1985|By Richard Christiansen, Entertainment editor.

``Cats`` is--no question about it--a spectacular show. Packaged with consummate theater craft and technology that make even its lamest and most mediocre segments seem monumental, it sells itself with all the lights, scenery, motion, music, costuming and colorful atmosphere that a large-scale musical can throw at an audience.

The production begins with a marvelous environmental setting of a cats`

junkyard that literally reaches out from the stage into the auditorium, and it ends with a sensational special space-age effect that might best be described as a Close Encounter of the Cats Kind.

In between, there are magic tricks, trapeze stunts, a pop-out pirate ship, fog machines, flash pots and scores of blinking Christmas tree lights, not to mention a chorus line of tap-dancing cockroaches and endless choruses of the hit song ``Memory.``

Little wonder, then, that many members of Saturday`s opening night audience in the Shubert Theatre gave the show a rousing welcome. For their money, they knew they had been given a big, fat, expensive show.

In fact, the production at the Shubert is very strong and highly polished. There are a few weak voices in the cast, but the 22 singers-dancers- actors are athletic and inexhaustible; and the scenery, though it doesn`t envelop the audience in quite the all-encompassing manner of the London and New York productions, has a few dazzling bits of its own. Placing the action within the frame of a proscenium arch also focuses the action more clearly.

In addition, thanks to an articulate cast and an excellent sound system, most of the words in the T.S. Eliot poems used as the show`s lyrics are intelligible, and the reasons for the night`s gathering of cats therefore become understandable. (This has not always been the case in other productions I have seen.)

When it first bowed in London four years ago, this musical, based on Eliot`s ``Old Possum`s Book of Practical Cats,`` looked like an exaggerated form of Christmas pantomime, the unique form of English musical entertainment in which actors dress up as animals in song-and-dance fairy tales.

Trevor Nunn, ``Cats`` director, grew up in that tradition, and he drew on it to create this fanciful musical. Coming out of his triumphant staging of

``The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby`` for the Royal Shakespeare Company, which he had turned into a triumphant celebration of live theater between actors and audience, Nunn used that same uniting experience to create theatrical excitement in ``Cats.``

With the aid of his brilliant designer John Napier, he created a stunning cats` nocturnal world, and he sent his actors, elaborately made up and costumed as cats, into the audience to mingle with the customers and draw them into that world.

Those elements are still at work in ``Cats,`` but in its journey across the Atlantic into Broadway and several subsequent touring versions, the show has acquired a hard, slick American gloss, as well.

The big numbers are now socked across with hard-driving show business efficiency, and the production, if anything, has become even gaudier than before.

The result is something of a cross between kiddie show innocence and Las Vegas brassiness. It doesn`t have much character, but it has plenty of show stoppers.

Audiences, who already have plunked down a record $6.6 million in ticket sales for the Chicago engagement, may not be knocked out by Andrew Lloyd Webber`s music or Gillian Lynne`s dances, but they surely can tell that they`re getting a lot for their money and that the cast is working hard for them.

Weird and indigestible as much of the show might seem, it has created a mystique that is undeniable. Perhaps because it has no real story and deals with nonhumans, it is safely neutral in its content. Most of its songs aren`t great, but they`re sold for all they`re worth, and though Lynne`s lunging, kicking cat-choreography quickly becomes repetitious, it`s danced with consistently energetic expertise by the cast.

In this large and able company, Diane Fratantoni is the tattered and forlorn glamor cat Grizabella, who milks every note of ``Memory.`` Russell Warfield is the agile cat Macavity, Barry K. Bernal is the balletic magician Mr. Mistoffelees, Calvin E. Rosenberg is the sage Old Deuteronomy, and John Dewar, in one of the show`s most endearing numbers, is the ancient cat Gus, who reminisces charmingly on his days in the theater.

The real star of the production, however, remains Napier`s design. Time after time, a sudden stroke of lighting makes a bad number seem better and an ingenious cat costume makes a good routine look great. Once, with only a large search beam in action, there`s a striking play of light and shadow that turns an ordinary dance into a tour de force.